VA Inches Toward a New Open VistA

The Veterans Affairs Department put out a request on Wednesday for technical help to develop a new, modern version of its decades-old Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) electronic health record system.

In March 2010, an industry advisory group tapped by VA CIO Roger Baker recommended the department update VistA, which is based on open source models and offered as the international standard for hospitals.

Wednesday's request for technical help with the VistA modernization project is a baby step in what looks like a long process. VA said it wants to hire two subject matter experts to do the governance structure thing to help set up an open source community for a new and improved VistA.

This structure will help insure software interoperability, software licensing and plans for a proposed independent foundation that would govern an Open Source version of VistA.

Not to be a crank, but the folks who developed the original VistA 30 years ago managed to do so without any kind of formal organizational structure -- which may be one reason its works so well.